Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals get majority with a third of popular vote

Results may cause a stir among proportional representation proponents

The Liberals’ landslide victory — in seats, if not the popular vote — has handed another piece of ammunition to opponents of the traditional first-past-the-post election style.

By handing Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals an apparent majority with perhaps a third of the popular vote, the outcome will be held up as a powerful argument in favour of proportional representation, the much discussed alternative that Ontario voters rejected in a 2007 referendum.

As the Catch 22 Campaign, a defunct remnant of the 2011 effort to bring proportional representation to Canada put it on Twitter: “6% popular vote dif between OLP & PCs gives Wynne double the seats. “The people have spoken” Right. Time for prop rep!”

The results were strikingly similar to another key example of this populist electoral reform project — the 1990 election that brought Bob Rae to power as the province’s first and only NDP premier, and saw then-Liberal leader David Peterson lose his own seat and 59 others.

In those results, Mr. Rae took 37.6% of the popular vote, beating Mr. Peterson by a slight 5%. Still, the NDP more than doubled the Liberal seat count, 74 to 36.

Ontario Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne (in red) sits with her mother Patsy O’Day (right) and father John Wynne along with partner Jane Rounthwaite (left) as they watch election results in Toronto on Thursday June 12, 2014. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn)

This time, the Liberal popular vote was hovering around 37%, to the Progressive Conservatives’ 31% and the NDP’s 26%, for a total spread across the three main parties of barely 10 percentage points.

And yet, it took only about an hour for the first news outlets to call a predicted majority, with the second place PCs winning less than half the number of seats as the Liberals.

Even within the Liberal party’s own fortunes, a shift of a couple of percentage points has meant the difference between victory and defeat.

Most bafflingly, in 1999, the Liberals came away with a greater share of the popular vote than this year, and yet they wound up in second place.